Islamic Finance Talent and the Habit We Forgot We Had

You probably know this meeting.

Someone senior puts a structure on the table. It looks a lot like the one used last year, which looked a lot like the one before that. Heads nod. Someone asks about the timeline. Nobody asks whether it is still the right structure. The meeting ends early, and everyone leaves feeling it went well.

I include myself in that room.

This week I read an article about how a research team at one of the big AI companies hires its people. One line was interesting: "The habit that trips up PMs from large companies is deference." If your boss says X, you do X, all the way down the chain, and nobody asks whether X is still right.

Deference. Which triggered interesting thought for me.

If there is one habit Islamic finance has mastered, it is respect for the senior voice. Some of that is good. Adab matters, and a junior analyst should not walk into a Sharīʻah board meeting and tell the scholars they are wrong. Somewhere between adab and silence, though, we lost something.

The cure for deference is already there from our scholars.

Do the reading, then disagree kindly

The advice in the article was simple: "the homework comes first: read what was tried and understand why it died. Then push, but in a way that is curious and builds trust." They have no patience for the hot take, "the 'you're wrong' that never gets into the details."

Ibn Rushd did exactly this more than eight centuries ago. His Bidāyat al-Mujtahid is, at heart, a map of disagreement. Issue by issue, he sets out where the jurists agreed, where they split, and why. He wrote it to prepare the next generation of jurists for independent reasoning.

The article has a phrase for people who handle disagreement well. They "join the discourse". They add to the conversation, build on it and change it in some way. Ibn Rushd did that centuries before anyone needed a phrase for it.

Stubborn about the right things

The article has another idea I liked. The team stopped writing detailed annual plans because the world kept moving faster than the plan. Now they write a few assumptions for the next three to six months and a plan for one month. Only a handful of commitments survive every rewrite, and the leader's word for these is "stubborn".

Stubborn about a few things, flexible about the rest. Our jurists had a maxim for this. Article 39 of the Ottoman Majallah says the change of rulings with the change of times is not denied.

They were careful with it, too. The maxim covers rulings built on custom (ʿurf) and public interest (maṣlaḥah). It does not touch rulings fixed by clear text, like the prohibition of ribā. Al-Shāṭibī, centuries earlier, drew a similar line. Worship stays fixed. Everyday dealings, commerce included, rest on human benefit.

So the tradition was stubborn about principles and relaxed about means.

In practice, that order is easy to flip without noticing. We get stubborn about a form because it passed last year's review, and relaxed about what the product is actually for. I am not pointing at anyone here. The pull works on all of us, me included.

The encouraging news is that people are already flipping it back. Bank Negara Malaysia's Annual Report 2025 describes a programme that "promotes wider use of risk-sharing contracts, such as mudarabah and musyarakah", and mentions discussions on "using Shariah contracts beyond tawarruq". In February 2018, Indonesia issued a USD 1.25 billion green sukuk that UNDP called "the world's first sovereign green sukuk". Two years later, Indonesia's retail Cash Waqf Linked Sukuk drew IDR 14.91 billion in orders from 1,041 waqf donors.

Hire for the hard thing, not the title

If I could put one line from the article on every HR office wall, it would be this: "What gets you hired is the hard thing you pushed through at your last company, not the size of your last title."

We have a talent problem, and we know it. The ICD-LSEG Islamic Finance Development Report 2026 says plainly that "significant talent and capacity gaps remain". Longer titles will not close that gap.

Two groups stand out on the AI team. The first is early-career people, who have less process to unlearn. The second is people who moved into product from jobs next to customers, because they already know the user.

Our industry has plenty of that second kind. The Takāful agent who knows why a family hesitates to sign. The branch officer who can tell you which clause confuses customers. The Sharīʻah reviewer who sees where the documents say one thing and practice does another. If I were building a product team, I would start there.

The team also warns every new hire that "the first two months should feel like some of the hardest of your career, and that means you're doing it right." The ones who struggle, the article says, tend to "arrive with the reasons they couldn't do X, Y, and Z". They are "waiting for a structure that isn't coming".

So what does this ask of us?

If you are a student or just starting out, read the arguments behind a product as well as the textbook. Before you pitch an idea, find out who tried it before and why it stopped. Then bring your own view anyway.

If you lead a team, hand your new people a real problem early, show them where the answers live, and then ask what they think. The hard part is listening when the answer is not the one you wanted.

If you are a regulator or supervisor, you already hold one of the best tools for this, which is consultation. Every consultation is an open invitation to the industry.

And if you are a researcher, naming a problem is useful. Naming one and testing a workable alternative is worth far more.

Where I would stop the comparison

I do not want to oversell this. An AI company is not an Islamic bank, and differences matter.

The first is the difference between questioning a practice and questioning a ruling. Anyone can ask why a process works the way it does, or whether a product still serves its purpose. A Sharīʻah ruling is another matter. In the mainstream Sunni position, someone who is not a mujtahid follows a qualified scholar (taqlīd),. Everything in this piece is about how we design, build and explain products. Rulings stay with the people qualified to give them.

The second is speed. An AI team can rewrite its plan every month. A bank holds people's savings, and a Takāful operator manages a fund that belongs to its participants. Prudential rules exist for good reasons. Learn fast, by all means, and take risk carefully.

Back to that meeting

The structure is on the table. Heads are nodding.

I do not want to be the person with the hot take. I do not want to be the person who nods out of habit either. So before I speak, I am trying to ask myself three things. Have I read why this was done before? Can I say what I see, with adab? Or am I waiting for a structure that is not coming?

Inspired by Nikhyl Singhal, "Inside PM at Anthropic: Who Makes It, and Who Doesn't", The Skip, 29 October 2026.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this blog are not necessarily those of the blog writer and his affiliations and are for informational purposes only.

Fuel more mind-shifting insights: Buy me a coffee and watch the wisdom percolate! ☕💡

If you found this blog post insightful, don’t forget to subscribe to our website for more updates. Your subscription will help us continue to bring you the latest insights. And if you think this post could benefit others, please feel free to share it. Let’s spread the knowledge together!